The Health Leadership Forum sat down with Abbe Don, Vice President of User Experience at Epocrates to discuss trends in mobile healthcare technology and the role that design will play in spreading adoption and use of these technologies. Don leads the team responsible for creating a contemporary and innovative mobile customer experience for caregivers. Prior to joining Epocrates in June 2013, she spent 25 years focused on user experience design for companies such as Apple, The Walt Disney Company, Hewlett Packard, and IDEO.

Last week CMS essentially reversed their compliance date stance for the Meaningful Use program in what amounted to a big smack in the face to any health care provider that has put in the effort and time to knock Stage 2 out of the park. Providers working hard to successfully meet the Stage 2 measures shouldn’t feel that it is all for naught. You are on the cutting edge of using technology to deliver better care, and that makes you some of the best care providers out there.

The healthcare analytics market is bursting with vendors, giving providers more options than ever before. In fact, in this perception study, providers mentioned a staggering 87 different vendors being considered for BI/analytics in value-based care. To that point, no single vendor was mentioned more than 7% of the time. In this report, KLAS makes sense of the growing vendor crowd and provides insights into the most-considered vendors.

“Business intelligence and analytics have gone from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ in today’s challenging healthcare environment,” said Joe Van De Graaff, report author. “To fulfill short-term analytics needs, many providers report shifting more consideration to vendors with healthcare-specific solutions. However, a clear market leader has yet to emerge.”

KLAS spoke to more than 100 healthcare providers to capture which vendors they are considering and in which specific arenas. Visit KLAS online at www.KLASresearch.com/KLASreports.

Throughout the past two years, I have rotated mainly through one system. To my dismay, it had been one of the worst as far as electronic health records (EHR) are concerned. Most days I observed the workflow, thinking “If they just did this, they would cut the duration of morning rounds in half.” Let us look past the point that I was usually bored out of my mind!
There was just so much wasted time in dealing with documentation and communication. We are in the digital age. It really shouldn’t be this complicated. I cannot imagine how frustrated the residents and attending physicians must have gotten during this nonsense. This part of the job, which is non-medical, has likely been the direct cause of many doctors’ burnout statuses.
Since I have limited exposure to other systems, I am curious to know if this was a well-below average situation or a fairly normal one (feel free to comment below).